


Mosquito Pollen.

by his tongue and liver (doubleinfinity)



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Cooking, Dialogue, Domestic Fluff, LMAO, Love, M/M, Neurological Disorders, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, domestic angst, filthy language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 15:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12986928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubleinfinity/pseuds/his%20tongue%20and%20liver
Summary: One Shot.After the asylum, Eddie and Chris cohabit with the money the government provided them, trying to live a domestic life while the memories of their torture inhabit the rooms.





	Mosquito Pollen.

**Author's Note:**

> 01/01: Avocado Shells.

The raw outline of pink skin around his wrists: radial nerves neatly snapped back like daisy chains, flesh uprooted and flaking, and, well, the small hairs that line his arms never grew back there. Chris gives them a look as he squeezes a seed from the snow pea shell, perforating the thin envelopes of chlorophyll.

No more chains around his wrists, no more hooks hitched to his shoulder blades. The sun comes in through the window raw, making a beam on the floorboards where Eddie sits, passive.

In direct sunlight, Eddie is the color of bone- as stiff and rich, too, his elbows laid spindly in his lap. He flits his eyes in a direction of vaguely left, pupils small as pinpricks. With his hair smoothed back by shower gel and cheekbones set for a resting scowl, he looks distinctly reptilian. As though his tongue will split and he could be crushing any threat in a slow-churning peristalsis. But Chris doesn’t mistake this for strength anymore.

The older turns from the kitchen counter. With palms moist and slightly leafy, he bends over and cups the male’s face, pressing a kiss to his chin.

“Did you get bitten?” he asks as he stands back upright.

Absently, Eddie flattens the tips of his fingers against his face, brushing at the tingle of saliva. He’s going to open his mouth and share something from far in his past, but his jaw closes quick. “Oh, the mosquitos,” he thinks, glancing down his arms. “Yeah, I guess they were fairly full in their nests last night.”

“I kept feeling the bumps, but I wasn’t sure if they were real,” Chris muses from above. At night, when he’s all blind in the eyes, Chris tries to trust what he can feel with his palms. He ran them up and down Eddie’s legs last night in the dark, which read like braille to him for once, instead of the smooth, stoic plane that they tend to be.

Eddie sees better during the night; Chris is sure the male’s senses clog up with stimulus during the day, sounds shaking the vitreous fluid in his eyes, vivid images bending the hairs in his ears until he has to hold them back. In the dark, there is nothing to distract him from what he inherently knows.

Here in the light, their kitchen and its makeshift ornaments dichotomize each other. The compensation checks paved their countertops in marble, installed cabinets into the walls, loaded the pull-out freezer at the bottom of the fridge with dry ice packaged meats and weekly blue apron portions. But instead of chrome sculptures or French-pressed oilart, the room is decorated with Eddie’s crafts.

It would be less mortifying to him if, for example, their skill level matched the age at which he made them (quality: 3/10, age: 43/47). The lopsided lemon shaped by shaking hands out of a mass of clay, with its flat bottom and a hollow circle spooned out of it, so Chris can put little secrets in there like a peanut that rolled away nights ago and resurfaced under the dishwasher. Or “portrait of a batshit man” which hangs by the microwave, stunningly similar to his ex-psychiatrist, who he hasn’t seen in years but to whom he still indirectly pays a symbolic hefty out-of-pocket fee when he gets his meds re-prescribed every month.

There is no sign of Chris’ own artistic prowess to be seen, though. The other had claws that would have torn through paper and sculptures, and he never really moved much from his bed anyways. He made medium out of his body, tearing the flesh from his own arms, but no one ever hung those up in the common room. The biohazard chute lingered somewhere on the spectrum between diorama and performance art. He takes issue with going as far as calling his survival a statement.

Taking a knife to links of asparagus on the cutting board, Chris addresses the male on the floor. “You know, they say only three to five percent of violent crimes are perpetrated by the mentally ill.”

A curl of resentment appears in Eddie’s intestine. He’s supposed to express wonder if he didn’t know that, he guesses, or make it known that he had. Instead, he responds “Whoever mocked up that statistic didn’t hear the term _criminally_ insane.”

Chris tilts his head, using the edge of the blade to push the vegetable minces into one pile so he can get to work on the carrots. “Kind of a different category altogether, yeah? Fuck-” He yanks his hand back from the board, an accidental knife-puncture blooming on his ring finger. “Just cut myself.”

He’s still not facing Eddie, so he doesn’t see the annoyed glow a half-smile on the younger’s face, which melts into disinterest. “Try having somebody cut your thighs with a boxcutter and fuck you while you’re still bleeding,” he acknowledges.

About a dozen comparisons of gore cross Chris’ mind. He restrains himself from mentioning any of them.

They suck at validating each other’s’ pain. They could take shifts but the flashbacks and triggers are so unpredictable that most of the time, they end up walking away from each other to deal with their own issues. Empathy clashes with competition. Even if their pain levels were the same, their narratives will never be. It’s impossible to cross-examine their torture without rubbing up against the annoyance that their own memories will always outrank the ones shared verbally.

“Are there any stats on mental illness and being insufferable?” Chris goads, turning to face the younger. “Because I see a positive correlation absolutely _shooting cum_ off the charts.” He holds the kitchen knife in front of him, its point facing Eddie, the measly farce of an injury trickling down his finger.

Eddie leans forward slightly, teeth in a snarl, palms flat on the floor and ready to push him to his feet. But then he leans back, the scaly rapscallion replaced by a gentle moth, and a small, careful smile falls over him. “No you,” he murmurs, batting his lashes.

The sky has started to dim, pulling dark-blue dust in through the windows. “Let me finish cooking, Eddie,” Chris offers, “Go fluff up the couch or whatever it is you’re good at.”

When he’s being prodded, Eddie feels more like a whole person. Like some loophole has formed in the vortex of how deeply he’s a victim and yet how incapable he is of sharing his agony, and he doesn’t have to prove either. Like they’re simply known.

They eat stir-fry in front of the tv, and as they watch, Eddie starts folding the laundry Chris’d brought up from the basement and dumped in the living room armchair- Eddie, who doesn’t even like to eat because he knows he’ll just get hungry again, _folding laundry_. Would it be demeaning for Chris to say he’s proud? Would it end up with his socks mismatched and his shirts in wrinkles? Maybe. But he says it anyway.


End file.
